Bureaucratizing the Clan: Impact of Technology Affordances on Control

Abstract

ABSTRACT We examine how technology affordances impact clan control mechanisms in organizations. Using an interpretive multisite case study of the use of body-worn cameras in police organizations and technology affordance theory, we identify five technology affordances (Practice Visualization, Behavior Sanitization, Panoptic Supervision, Multiplex Evaluation, and Evidence Persistence). Actualization of these affordances constitutes affordance-based control, which reconfigures clan control mechanisms and extends the scope and intensity of bureaucratic control in our case sites, thereby bureaucratizing the clan. Our study makes significant contributions to affordances, organizational control, and technology-mediated control theory and practice. First, we develop a process model of affordance-based control, demonstrating technology’s role in constraining and enabling employees and supervisors to enact clan and bureaucratic control, respectively. Second, we show how affordance-based control extends the control relationship from traditional dyadic supervisor-employee control to triadic supervisor-technology-employee control. Finally, our study shows how affordance-based control facilitates the co-creation of control mechanisms by actualizing employee and supervisor affordances individually and jointly. Thus, affordance-based control can afford participatory supervision, empowering employees to have an input in control mechanisms that were historically imposed on them.